When we took our daily reading from the New York Mercantile Exchange, oil was valued at $83.14 a barrel, a full dollar higher than the second-highest reading, recorded 9 days ago.

The latest surge in oil came about as the senators in the United States seemed to be pressing for war against Iran. Yesterday the Senate voted 76-22 in favour of declaring Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. Hillary Clinton was among senators who voted for the amendment.

Germans don’t like inflation. You may recall from your history, that during the pre war years, the country suffered from hyper inflation pushing the economy to its knees, and of course then creating an environment ripe for fascism.

In France, between the wars, just like in the UK, a bigger problem...Read More

Yesterday the OECD published its latest review of the UK economy. It was good stuff, GDP per capita is now the third highest in the G7, compared with the lowest 10 years earlier. It said the United Kingdom’s welcoming approach to globalisation has contributed to a strong growth...Read More

The CBI’s top man, Richard Lambert, used to be a member of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee. So it seems reasonable to assume he knows a thing or two about our central bank. Yesterday he launched a scathing attack on the government, the FSA and Bank...Read More

When the Bank of England agreed to inject Â£10 billion of liquidity into the money markets, many accused it of wimping out. One moment it was saying it did not want to reward banks for their reckless ways and the next it’s printing money like there is no tomorrow. Even...Read More

Debt has value; debt that seems fairly safe, that is not beset with default and payments problems has even more value and, let’s face it, Northern Rock owns an awful lot of debt. Not its debt, understand, but the mortgage borrowers it has lent money to in the past.

Maybe it’s desperation on the part of Microsoft. Yesterday, the company which seems to be under threat from all quarters: from the EU commission, from Google, from Linux, from Sony and Nintendo and from Apple, has just attempted to buy itself a big chunk of the face of the Internet’s...Read More

Alan Greenspan called it â€˜irrational exuberance’. It’s when absurdly optimistic investors push the values of companies to completely unrealistic levels. Then there’s the opposite. The other day we called it â€˜irrational exacerbation’. That’s when the public backlash against banks threatens to turn a problem into a full blown major crisis....Read More

According to this morning’s FT, BP’s new chief executive, Tony Hayward, told staff at a meeting in Houston that its third quarter results will “be awful.”
It is understood that Mr Hayward believes that BP is suffering from an over-complex management structure, one in which no one seems to be...Read More

Yesterday the OECD published its latest review of the UK economy. It was good stuff, GDP per capita is now the third highest in the G7, compared with the lowest 10 years earlier. It said the United Kingdom’s welcoming approach to globalisation has contributed to a strong growth...Read More

Germans don’t like inflation. You may recall from your history, that during the pre war years, the country suffered from hyper inflation pushing the economy to its knees, and of course then creating an environment ripe for fascism.

In France, between the wars, just like in the UK, a bigger problem...Read More

The CBI’s top man, Richard Lambert, used to be a member of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee. So it seems reasonable to assume he knows a thing or two about our central bank. Yesterday he launched a scathing attack on the government, the FSA and Bank...Read More

Well, we now know what a fickle lot we are. The run on Northern Rock just goes to show how easily the public can panic. Presumably then if one of the big banks, or one of the companies that regularly publishes a report on the housing market, was to start...Read More

You may recall that when we first started hearing about the US subprime crisis, much of the news related to Bear Stearns, and how two of its hedge funds were set to collapse, so bad was their exposure to subprime.

Bear Stearns is the fifth biggest US securities firm. Until problems...Read More

Earlier this year, analysts warned that should house prices stop rising, then the result could be recession. Falling house prices seemed unthinkable. And yet, things have got so much worse, but most are still saying recession can be avoided, and now they have started talking about mid-cycle blues.